The Biden administration, failing to get enough congressional cooperation to trample on the Second Amendment, continues its war against gun dealers.
Breitbart reported on Aug. 31 that Joe Biden’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) “announced a proposed rule Thursday requiring universal background checks, which Congress has rejected for more than 20 years.” In other words, according to Breitbart, the Biden administration is attempting a workaround to enforce Democrats’ unconstitutional anti-gun agenda. The Founding Fathers warned that disarming the people was the first step toward tyranny.
I previously wrote a VIP post about how hundreds of gun dealers suddenly lost their licenses to Biden’s ATF, in what the gun industry says is a back-handed way of undermining gun rights (if you’re not already a VIP subscriber, join today!). Some dealers informed the media that the federal government is hurting a major ally in identifying “suspicious gun buyers” by targeting legitimate gun dealers. But the Biden administration is successfully hurting gun dealers’ business. “We were making $1 million a year, now it’s less than $100,000,” gun dealer Anthony Navarro told the Wall Street Journal. “This policy is designed to be a backdoor violation of the Second Amendment.” Now there’s the new ATF rule, also aimed at gun dealers.
”The ATF’s rule will redefine language so that there is not simply a category of Americans buying and selling guns from and to one another — as they have done since 1791 — and a category of Federal Firearms Licensed holders (FFLs) selling guns at retail,” Breitbart explained. “Rather, every seller will have to prove he is not trying to make a profit, or he will be required to ensure the purchaser undergoes a background check before taking possession of the firearm.”
Biden’s Department of Justice (DOJ) stated:
The Justice Department today announced it has submitted to the Federal Register a notice of proposed rulemaking that would clarify the circumstances in which a person is “engaged in the business” of dealing in firearms and thus required to obtain a license and run background checks. The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (BSCA), enacted June 25, 2022, expanded the definition of engaging in the business of firearms dealing to cover all persons who devote time, attention, and labor to dealing in firearms as a regular course of trade or business to predominately earn a profit through the repetitive purchase and sale of firearms. On March 14, President Biden issued Executive Order 14092, which, among other things, directs the Attorney General to develop and implement a plan to clarify the definition of who is engaged in the business of dealing in firearms and thus required to obtain a federal firearms license. Today’s proposed rule would amend the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) regulations by, among other things, conforming ATF’s regulations to the new BSCA definition and further clarifying the conduct that presumptively requires a license under that revised definition.
Attorney General Merrick B. Garland framed the measure as a way to prevent criminals from getting guns. The problem with that claim is that many if not most of gun crimes are not committed by legal gun owners.
For instance, a 2016 University of Pittsburgh analysis found, “Lawful gun owners commit less than a fifth of all gun crimes.” In 2019, federal DOJ data showed that of prisoners jailed for a crime during which they had a gun, the majority did not purchase the gun legally or directly, getting it instead through the underground market, theft, someone else purchasing it for them, etc. In 2020, Fox News reported that a “national survey of prison inmates aged 18 to 40, published by Preventative Medicine, found that only one in 10 bought the firearm involved in the act that resulted in them being jailed.”
In other words, the Biden administration is not trying to get guns out of the hands of criminals. That is an unfounded excuse to target gun rights.
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